The full-scale freakout going on by the anti-gay bigots over the Day of Silence is quite interesting to watch. They’re reading off the same dishonest talking points over and over again. Matt Barber, on a
Concerned Women for America radio show, said the following. Let’s count how many lies you can find in just a single paragraph:

“The Day of Silence is a propagandist day sponsored by GLSEN, the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, one of the most militant and well-funded adult homosexual activist groups. They use kids, from middle school to high school through college, as pawns to try and further their very deceptive agenda…

Not only a lie, but blatantly hypocritical as well. GLSEN doesn’t “use” anyone. They have information on how to carry out a Day of Silence protest, but participation is absolutely voluntary. Kids from around the country who are tired of being bullied or seeing their friends bullied, are standing up and saying “enough.” The events are student-initiated and no one has to talk them into doing it, much less “use” them.

Now for the hypocrisy: you’ll notice that on that radio show webpage is a link to the Day of Truth, the ADF’s answer to the Day of Silence. But of course you would never hear Matt Barber accuse the ADF of “using” kids to “further their agenda.” Kids are only “used” by those Barber disagrees with; when those on his side do the exact same thing, that’s not using kids….for special, lucky, magic reasons.

…What they do is they have these kids remain silent, disrupt the school day, remain silent in class and throughout the day…

Another lie. They don’t “have” the kids do this, the kids choose to do this. And they do not disrupt anything, nor do they have to remain silent in class. Kids are encouraged to talk to their teachers beforehand and inform them of their protest. If the teacher chooses to call on them anyway, they are encouraged to answer. If they refuse to answer, they can rightly be punished by the school. And I’ll get to the utter hypocrisy of this lie in a moment.

…in order to protest the alleged violence and harassment and bullying of children who identify as gay, lesbian, transgender and so forth…

Alleged violence and harassment? Is Barber so deluded that he’s going to deny that gays (and those falsely thought to be gay) are bullied and harassed in schools? Of course he is; reality, after all, is whatever he declares it to be. Never mind that study after study shows the opposite, that the overwhelming majority of students in public schools report hearing kids called faggot or dyke virtually every day.

Never mind the thousands of kids who are beaten up every year by bullies based solely on assumptions about their sexuality. Never mind Lawrence King, who just a few weeks ago was shot and killed by a fellow student because he asked the kid to go to a dance with him. The Day of Silence this year was dedicated to his memory. Perhaps Barber thinks King is only allegedly dead.

But really what it amounts to is a day of propaganda, wherein people who believe what God says about sexuality, who believe that human sexuality is to be within the bonds of marriage between one man and one woman, they’re taught that they’re homophobic, that they’re bigoted and so forth.

They’re taught that? By whom? Please, Matt, name me a single school that taught anything like that. Yet another lie. The Day of Silence has nothing to do with what is taught in schools, it is a purely personal protest on the part of students. No one is taught anything. Some schools may choose to use the protest as an opportunity to speak out against bullying, but that is hardly the same thing.

So, as our listeners know, we are participating in and I know Antioch Bible Church is participating in as well, a Day of Silence walkout, urging parents if their schools are participating to keep their kids home from school on the Day of Silence, which is April 25th.”

And here’s that hypocrisy again. Some of the kids in a school choosing not to speak for a day in a silent protest, that’s “disrupting” the school. But telling parents to just have their children skip school? Nah, that’s not disruptive at all. These people wouldn’t know honesty or reality if it crawled up their pantleg, perched on their ass and yodeled the Ave Maria.